1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a mobile terminal, and more particularly, to a mobile terminal and method for controlling place recognition.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile terminals have evolved to provide various services and functions. To increase the utilization of the mobile terminals and satisfy various users' demands, a variety of applications have been developed for execution in the mobile terminals.
Therefore, hundreds of applications can be stored and displayed on a touch screen in a mobile terminal such as a smartphone, a portable phone, a laptop Personal Computer (PC), or a tablet PC. The mobile terminal and the applications are controlled in accordance with a touch on or hovering over the touch screen made by an input unit such as a finger, an electronic pen, or a stylus pen. The mobile terminal can detect its location by the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Location recognition techniques include outdoor and indoor location recognition. The outdoor location recognition relies mainly on GPS. Many techniques using infrared communication have been developed for indoor location recognition, such as Bluetooth®, a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag, and Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) Access Point (AP). A drawback with such indoor location recognition techniques is that many preparations and devices (for example, an infrared communication device, setting of places for recognition of an RF ID tag and installation of tags in the places, and installation of Bluetooth® devices at respective locations) are required for places to be recognized.
The indoor location recognition technique using a Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) Access Point (AP) obviates the need for installing equipment in advance because a sufficient number of APs have already been installed in an urban area under a wireless communication-enabled environment. Thus, methods for recognizing a place based on the strength or response time of a WiFi signal have been developed. These methods include trilateration and finger printing. The finger printing is more popular, as it tends to increase the accuracy of place recognition.
The WiFi-based location recognition technique requires a set of training data to learn a model for recognizing a user's place. To build the training data, every place should be segmented into grids each having a predetermined size, and information about the strength of a WiFi signal at the center of every grid should be collected. Performing this operation for every indoor place that a user visits is not practical, and an increase in the number of visited places also increases the size of a signal strength data set. This increases the time for place recognition.
Moreover, the place recognition method of the related art requires labeling of every user-visited place meter by meter, which consumes time and is cumbersome. Since a user selects a place to visit, the names of major places are ignored and thus are not stored. If a user visits a number of places, the size of a database increases significantly, thereby increasing a processing time for place recognition.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a method of determining whether a user currently visits a major place, using at least one of state information about a mobile terminal and user information in a mobile environment, receiving at least one signal from a signal transmission device such as a WiFi AP, if the user currently visits a major place, and automatically collecting and learning GPS information about the place, so that when the user revisits the place, the place may be automatically recognized.